The First Department () was in charge of secrecy and political security of the workplace of every enterprise or institution of the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
that dealt with any kind of technical or scientific information (
plant
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...
s,
R&D institutions, etc.) or had printing capabilities (e.g.,
publishing house
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
s).
Every branch of the Central Statistical Administration and its successor the State Statistics Committee (
Goskomstat
The Federal State Statistics Service (, abbreviated as Rosstat) is the governmental statistics agency in Russia.
Since 2017, it is again part of the Ministry of Economic Development, having switched several times in the previous decades betw ...
) also had a First Department to control access, distribution, and publication of official economic, population, and social statistics. Copies of especially sensitive documents were numbered and labeled or stamped as secret or "For official use only". In some cases, the "official use" version of documents mimicked the public use versions in format but provided much more detailed information.
[A description of the operations of the First Department within statistical offices can be found in Barbara A. Anderson, Kalev Katus, and Brian D. Silver, "Developments and Prospects for Population Statistics in Countries of the Former Soviet Union," ''Population Index'' 60, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 4-20.]
The first departments were a part of the
KGB
The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...
and not subordinated to the management of the enterprise or institution. Among its functions was control of access to information considered state secret, of foreign travel, and of publications. The First Department also kept account of the usage of copying devices (
xerographers,
printing press
A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in whi ...
es,
typewriter
A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...
s, etc.) to prevent unsanctioned copying, including
samizdat.
See also
*
Censorship
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governmen ...
*
Spetskhran
References
Soviet internal politics
Soviet phraseology
Data security
KGB
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